Wrestling with Rhetoric and Composition

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Welch’s reconfiguration of delivery is based on what Walter Ong has identified as three stages of consciousness: primary orality, literacy, and secondary orality. Welch equates delivery to secondary orality in her analysis, focusing her expansion of delivery on including the various systems through which information is delivered.

Notes:
“In our own century, the canons’ enormous and largely unacknowledged power has occurred in the reliance of writing pedagogy on textbooks that truncate the five canons from five to three, so that invention, arrangement (form), and style repeatedly colonize the last two – memory and delivery – and then eradicate them.” – 18
(Note: I would like to propose that delivery colonizes all. Or rather, delivery has ambassadors in the other canons, stabilizing the relationships.)

“If writing is a tool, then it is part of the Cartesian reality in which we all continue to live. A tool is a thing out there in the world, a palpable object that one can store in the garage and retrieve as necessary. A tool can be put aside; language cannot. The persistence of the tool metaphor reveals a great deal about how language is regarded; it is a metaphor that needs to be examined and replaced.” – 18

“The elimination of memory and delivery in the majority of student writing textbooks constitutes the removal of student-written language from the larger public arena. The removal reinforces the common, dualistic idea that students live outside ideology if they chose to do so, just as they are outside language if they choose to be.” – 18

“It is this suppression of ideology and the attempt to stand outside language that provide two of the connections between traditional literary study and the traditional study of writing. Memory and delivery interfere with the writing process and its privileging of invention and the thoughts and feelings of the writer; to this extent they are dangerous to the status quo of the process movement, both expressivist and cognitivist.” – 19
(Note: Interfere, or force one to think about and take recognition of…)

“Memory and delivery do not wither with the growing dominance of writing; rather, they change form.” – 19

“Writing textbooks maintain the destructive commitment to three of five canons partly through connection and repetition; the books frequently repeat material that has occurred in other books, partly because new textbooks are contracted according to the publishing genres of the rhetoric, the reader, and the argument book.” – 19

“Most writing textbooks are based not on new, energizing, and important writing theory but on, simply, the genres of other textbooks.” – 19

“The rigorous suppression of memory and delivery (to provide one historical example) connects as well to the cordoning off of rhetoric enacted by Ramus in the sixteenth century, when he constructed rhetoric in a way that made invention, arrangement, and memory central parts of dialectic and not of rhetoric.” – 20
(Note: Welch is paraphrasing Ong here. See her works cited for specifics.)

“In Ramus’s powerfully influential construction, rhetoric was diminished by removing canons that were central to it. We continue to work with the results of this legacy.” – 20

“The idea of memory as consciousness and the connection of memory to psychology (cognitive and depth, to name two kinds) continues to be an important are in the theory, practice, and production of discourse.” – 21

“Delivery in its life as medium has acquired enormous power in the twentieth century.” – 21

“I hope to offer some suggestions about one strategy for reorganizing the humanities – one that is dangerous in many ways – rather than perpetuating its current life as a wizened, toothless being that is acknowledged as important and then sharply ignored. In other words, I hope to make the connection between the crucial placement of writing as a central form of articulation in our time and dominant culture and as a center for the re-creation of the humanities away from the pabulumized, weekend diversion that it now appears to be in the dominant culture.” – 21 [sic]

“Delivery is weakened if it refers only to the gesture, physical movement, and expression that many commentators have dismissed it as doing.” – 21
(Note: Use this somewhere!)

“the connection between delivery and kinds of literacy is important.” – 22

“Delivery is a site for excavating how electronic forms of discourse have changed the ways that rhetoric operates now and how strong-text theorists (to use Deborah Brandt’s term from Literacy as Involvement) have not taken account of it.” – 22

“Primary orality is characterized by an emphasis on speaking not only for communication but also for the transmission of cultural values, norms, behaviors, and ideologies. Primary orality indicates a kind of consciousness in which the dynamism of the spoken word is powerful but evanescent; its very burst of energy plays it out. It ends. Only spoken repetition keeps it going.” – 22

“Literacy…began in about 720-700 BCE and contributed to the development of abstraction and therefore the burst of abstract writing that characterized fourth-century BCE Greece. Literacy accelerated in the fifteenth century with the establishment of print discourse. Secondary orality, Ong’s third stage, began in the nineteenth century, when various electronic devices revolutionized communications.” – 22

“The spoken word is now frequently electrified, instantaneous, repetitive, and so familiar that we take it for granted or, more usually, cordon it off into another Cartesian category out there in the world, retrievable and usable as necessary but not an inherent part of human beings. Contrary to this dominant notion, however, is the idea that group consciousness now depends to a great extent on secondary orality. Like air, it exists and sustains us.” – 23

“We have many ways of communicating. The reading and writing of texts and the formation of consciousness based on written communication – literacy – have not been displaced by anything; rather, they have grown even more powerful, as the record number of published books indicates. Writing has changed irrevocably because of secondary orality; composition needs to take account of this change with more thorough theories that will inform composition textbooks.” – 23

“According to Ong, primary orality is ‘additive rather than subordinative,’ ‘aggregative rather than analytic,’ ‘redundant or “copious,” ‘ ‘conservative or traditionalist,’ ‘close to the human lifeworld,’ ‘agonistically toned,’ ’empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced,’ and ‘homeostatic.'” – 24

“1. Secondary orality is repetitive. Televised texts can be screened endlessly. The phenomenon of the sound bite depends for its existence on its repeatability. Its essence can be said to lie in its repetition. Televised advertising, obviously, depends on repetition for part of its power.
2. Television texts in secondary orality are formulaic. For example, the 30-minute text of the ‘NBC Nightly News’ (22 minutes of news and 8 minutes of commercials) is comprised of lead stories, secondary stories, filler, and ‘humor,’ all slotted according to the lengths and requirements of advertisements, which, in the UNited States, control this form of delivery.
3. Television texts in secondary orality are additive. For example, a television station can stay on the air for 16 hours, 20 hours, or 24 hours a day; it need only add material, usually material that has been conveyed previously.” – 24
(Note: Many of these observations still hold up, but it is interesting to see how this is currently shifting given how television as a medium is currently undergoing significant change. Think binge watching and DVRs.)

“The texts from both kinds of orality rely on formula, repetition, addition, and so on.” – 24

“The texts from primary and secondary orality appear to be centered on big events.” – 24

“In other words, in the collaboratively written Homeric text and the collaboratively written Nightly News text, the formula requires some contrast between the presentation of big events; otherwise, readers/spectators would be exhausted.” – 25

“secondary orality is not a destroyer of literacy. It is, instead, an extension of literacy.” – 25

“literacy and secondary orality are not in opposition.” – 25

“Robert Scholes’s designations in Textual Power are useful here; he identifies three phases, which he names skills, in confronting a text: reading, interpretation, and criticism (21-41). Reading in Scholes’s formulation is ‘largely unconscious’ and ‘based upon a knowledge of the codes that were operative in the composition of any given text and the historical situation in which it was composed.’ (21). Interpretation concerns the finding of meaning in a text. Scholes used the example of reading a parable for its story but interpreting it for its meaning (22). Criticism involves a response based on being a member of a group. Criticism requires going beyond the merely personal. It is a critique of the themes and the codes in a text. – 25

“People are simply not in the intellectual habit of critiquing a video text. Frequently, people respond that the televised text is not worthy of this kind of investigation. Television texts, rock music texts, radio texts, and so on are dismissed. In fact, they frequently are not textualized.” – 26

“Electronic texts abound; refraining from analyzing their operations as part of secondary orality, as powerful sources of delivery, means that decoders are going to be less sophisticated in dealing with the powerful forms of the newly powerful delivery systems of secondary orality.” – 26

“A number of textbooks now on the market are theoretically sensitive, pedagogically sound, and attractive in many other ways, but the vast majority (the readers, the rhetorics, the argument books, and the hybrids) do not substantially account for the powerful new kinds of delivery. Rather, they treat the forms of electronic discourse not as issues that affect consciousness but as new sources of content.” – 26

“Students are shown how to cite electronic forms of discourse, but they are not taught anything about the new forms of consciousness brought about by those kinds of texts. In fact, a distressingly high number of the books continue to repeat the truncated canons, the modes of discourse, and an attenuated version of ‘process.’ The highly oral features of our students’ discourse – the repetition, the formalism, and the additive qualities, for example – are not accounted for.” – 26

“These textbooks – with some exceptions – act as if secondary orality has not changed delivery, and that we are not all conditioned by these forms. A duality develops. Electronic discourse is for ‘real’ life. Print discourse, including students’ own writing, is for school culture (which, it goes without saying, is a central site for the promulgation of official culture).” – 26

“Real life and school life are disconnected and students are not shown what they need: how the discourses of real life and school life partake of the same thing. When we fail to make these connections in our writing courses, we give up the most powerful of the available means of persuasion in the particular case of wising up our students and ourselves, to echo Aristotle vaguely.” – 27
(Note: Connections to Trimbur here.)

“When we erase the forms of secondary orality, we erase what we know is there…This need not, and must not, continue.” – 27

“Students who are able to interpret electronic texts in sophisticated ways will be more likely (and able) to interpret other texts that constitute their lives.” – 28

“Reading is not enough. Writing, encoding, is required to understand adequately how texts operate in secondary orality. Students need to know how to write manipulative discourses as well as straightforward discourses. They need to know how to write what Jasper Neel, in Plato, Derrida, and Writing, calls ‘anti-writing,’ writing in which a student hides out, not making any kind of connection.” – 28

“By examining the dynamism of the spoken word, we can better include non-European groups that have historically been excluded and marginalized, left to lament that they are not understood by the dominant university culture. Orality/literacy/secondary orality theory offers us one way of better understanding, including, and empowering students from these cultures.” – 28

“Empowerment in writing can take place with the use of orality/literacy/secondary orality theory. This empowerment can derive from making writing courses locations for the training of cultural critics who understand the pressures and possibilities of delivery in its newly revivified manifestations.” – 28

“writing textbooks must account for delivery as it exists in secondary orality. They must stop their erasure of electronic discourse from the domain of school rhetoric.” – 29

I’m noticing a trend in my reading of being disappointed in how narrow our collective understanding as scholars is of delivery. I didn’t think my understanding of delivery was as radical or groundbreaking as it is turning out to be. Here, Dragga is, like many of his contemporaries, confined to an incredibly narrow understanding of what delivery is and its role in the rhetorical process, especially during composition. However, what is important in Dragga’s work here is developing an ethical understanding of delivery through surveying practicing technical writers and technical writing students. This survey ask participants to score the ethical delivery of content in various rhetorical situations as “completely ethical,” “mostly ethical,” “ethics uncertain,” “mostly unethical,” and “completely unethical.”

Notes:
“I teach my writing students to perceive the canon of invention as analysis of aim and audience as well as information gathering, the canon of arrangement as the organization of information to achieve a clear and cohesive discourse, the canon of style as the choice of appropriate words and illustrations, the canon of memory as the process of inscribing the discourse to avoid dependence on human memory, and the canon of delivery as the displaying of typographic and illustrative characteristics on a page or screen.” – 79
(Note: Definition of delivery is AGAIN narrow.)

“This revival of delivery has given writers new rhetorical power. And with his new power to design information comes new obligations, specifically ethical obligations.” – 80

“Studies of ethics typically emphasize the canons of invention, arrangement, and style because it is invention, arrangement, and style that compose the traditional territory of writers. And studies of typography, illustrations, and page design ordinarily ignore ethical issues because ethics is the traditional territory of invention, arrangement, and style.” – 80

“Although such studies of the ethics of technical communication typically ignore visual display, research on the canon of delivery gives little space to ethical issues.” – 81

“The failure of technical communication research to address this important issue leaves technical writing teachers without the guidance necessary to direct the ethical exercise of this new rhetorical power. And without the guidance of research, students and professionals are likely to adopt ad hoc and oftentimes erratic guidelines.” – 82

Dragga 83

Dragga 84

“The professionals, I hypothesized, would be likely to adopt a pragmatic perspective on ethical issues, weighing the political and economic implications of their decisions and judging the seven situations according to the utility of their consequences.” – 85

“The students, I hypothesized, might be likely to ignore the practical implications of their choices and consider only the intrinsic morality of the seven situations.” – 85

“If the opinions of students and professionals differ radically on the ethical issues, the teacher’s job of developing and teaching delivery guidelines is itself a genuine ethical dilemma…If the opinions of students and professionals prove similar, however, the teacher’s job of developing and teaching ethical guidelines is easier, and the student’s transition to practicing technical communicator is also simplified.” – 85

Dragga 86

Dragga 89

“According to the survey findings, professional technical writers are typically decisive regarding the ethics of delivery: Sixty-six percent of their answers were either ‘completely ethical’ (46%) or ‘completely unethical’ (20%). Students, however, are ordinarily tentative: Thirty-nine percent of their answers were either ‘completely ethical’ (25%) or ‘completely unethical’ (14%), versus the qualifies yes of ‘mostly ethical’ (26%) and the qualifies no of ‘mostly unethical’ (19%).” – 92

“According to the findings of the ethics survey, a philosophy of ethical delivery is only beginning to develop. Students and professionals achieve consensus on only two issues: the reduction of the number of pages by means of a smaller type size and less leading (completely ethical) and the fabrication of visual information (completely unethical).” – 94

“Neither students nor professionals, however, have developed a consensus on the issues of graphic distortion and the utilization of spacing and typography to divert the audience’s attention. The writing teacher’s intervention is especially critical here.” – 94

“The restoration of the canon of delivery thus imposes ethical obligations on writers and on writing teachers. If students are tentative regarding the ethics of their delivery choices, it is the responsibility of writing teachers to address this subject, to assign appropriate exercises, and to bring together students and professionals to discuss the ethics of delivery, to discover specific guiding principles, and thus to develop a philosophy of ethical delivery. In doing so, writing teachers will contribute meaningfully to the practice and direction of the field of technical communication as well as to the education and professional preparation of their students. By continuing to investigate the ethics of visual and typographical display and by continuing to question the ethical choices of students and professionals, writing teachers will also assure both writers and readers that the canon of delivery genuinely serves to improve the readability, usability, and memorability of human discourse.” – 94

I like Bolter’s focus on the rhetorical implications of hypertext. I think there are a few ideas in here that could stand as a way in to discussing delivery in the context of both digital AND printed texts and finding a model that fits both. While Bolter puts a lot of great ideas forward about hypertext, I again feel, like many others I have been reading, he is a bit short sighted when it comes to the larger understanding of rhetorical delivery.

While I had originally intended for this post to be a collection of notes, I found myself responding quite a bit while gathering my collected quotes. So it’s turned into a hybrid notes/response post. So it goes.

Notes:
“Although word processing remains the most popular use of the personal computer, it is not fully electronic writing….the goal of word processing is still to produce attractive printed output. The flexibility exists only during the process of composition. Once the document is put on paper, it is no more fluid than any other printed text, and the reader of the document still confronts a fixed and finished structure of words…With the word processor the writing process has changed, but the product has not.” – 97
(Note: I would argue that printed texts are not always fixed, and the reader does’t always confront a finished product in which he or she has no part. Since my model for delivery applies to printed and digital texts, this point is probably going to emerge in my thesis. My argument for the flexibility on printed text? Danielewski’s House of Leaves and Only Revolutions.)

“When a text is written to be read on the computer screen, then both writer and reader can take advantage of the flexibility of the new medium. A text that is meant to be read at the computer no longer needs to have a single, linear presentation. It can instead consist of topical units (paragraphs, sections, chapters) that are related in a variety of ways. This structure of topics is then offered to the reader, who can decide which topics to view and in what order.” – 98
(Note: same note from above applies here.)

“[With hypertext] graphs, pictures, and maps can be linked to verbal text and made available for the reader to explore…Thus, words, graphics, animation, sounds, and video can all be disposed as units in a hypertext” – 98
(Note: What Bolter calls units appears to be functioning similarly to what I call a mode of composition.)

“The text itself, what the reader sees on the screen, arises from the interaction between the link structure and the reader’s decisions. There is, however, a further level of flexibility; the reader can add new topics and new links to the web. In other words the reader can join in the process of writing the evolving hypertext.” – 98

“In an obvious sense, a printed text exists and remains the same, whether it is in the readers’ hands or sitting unread on a shelf. The printed text is present with or without the reader’s action. However, a hypertext is not present at all until the reader call it onto screen.” – 99
(Note: I disagree. A hypertext is present before the reader calls it onto the screen. Just because it is not currently being looked at doesn’t make it any less present. It’s present in virtual form, but it is still present; it still exists.)

“On a diskette or in computer memory, a hypertext is only a potential text, a structure of possibilities that reader must activate.” – 99
(Note: Like above, I take contention with this claim. I think a hypertext is a text with multiple potentialities. The finished form is activated by the reader, but all of the materials that comprise the text are still there; they simply are without a path.)

“the electronic text itself is defined in the act of delivery.” – 100

“Electronic technology disrupts both literary theory and composition theory. It disrupts literary theory by admitting a whole new body of materials (interactive texts) that need theoretical treatment. It disrupts composition theory by providing new facilities (for interactivity and multimedia presentation) that will need to be incorporated into the pedagogy.” – 100

“hypertext brings together the canons of delivery and arrangement, in the sense that the arrangement of a hypertext, the order in which the topics appear on the reader’s screen, is determined in the act of delivery.” – 100
(Note: Relationship between the act of delivery and the time of delivery? Can these be separate? Do they overlap? When a single text is delivered repeatedly across multiple times, is it a single act of delivery? Or is each occurrence its own act?)

“With hypertext, arrangement means shaping or making the argument appropriate to its context. And hypertext further blurs the distinction between arrangement and invention. Hypertextual readers participate in invention, to the extent that they determine the argument itself based on choices made.” – 100

“There is another sense in which hypertext redefines invention: it does so by redefining the notion of a topic…Hypertext is by definition topical in the sense that it requires the author and reader to conceive of text in elementary units that are located in a writing space…A topic is a verbal or visual element that has unity or coherence: It is meaningful in a variety of contexts depending on the path that the reader follows in arriving at the topic. A topic is also a place, usually both the destination and the anchor for a number of links.” – 101

“Topics can be fashioned out of topics, and we can see a string of topical units as a topic int he Aristotelian sense, a formal structure in which the links from one element to others provide rhetorical direction and force.” – 101

“The link itself raises expectations in readers, just as the footnote does in readers of a printed book. It is the task of the writer of hypertext to prepare the readers’ expectations in the first topical unit and, if the readers follow the link, to satisfy those expectations in the second unit.” – 101

“Topics and links in a hypertext define formal shapes. For example, there is a ‘footnote’ shape: A link leads from one topic to another, and the second topic is linked back to the first…This shape can be extended to create a ring of topics, in which Topics A leads to B, which leads to C, and so on, until the final topic leads back to A. A star shape would consists of one of topic with multiple branches that emanate like rays from the center. Also, there is linear presentation, in which each topic leads to the next as in a printed text…Many other shapes are possible, and each will have a certain rhetorical effect. The word ‘shape’ could be translated into Greek as schema and into Latin as figura, which reminds us that ancient theory regarded figures of thought and speech as rhetorical shapes.” – 102 [sic]

“Hyperbaton is a general figure of rearrangement. It is the departure from normal word order for rhetorical effect…Hyperbaton is also the controlling figure of hypertext. In the process of delivery, a hypertext makes almost constant use of hyperbaton. The topics of the hypertext appear in a variety of ‘unusual’ orders, because there is no normal order, no single order defined and sanctioned by the author. Readers fashion hyperbaton as they read.” – 102

“hyperbaton places demands on the reader. It demands a suspension not of belief, but of the desire for syntactical completion: The reader must hold one element in mind while waiting for the other elements that will complete the expression.” – 103

“hyperbata are chosen by readers and, if the hypertext is well organized under a rhetoric of departures and arrivals, readers should be able to maintain their orientation. Hyperbaton is the reason for creating pedagogical hypertexts or textual databases in the first place. Readers want to be able to violate the conventional order of a printed text.” – 103

“With hypertext, however, the rubrics of style and delivery become two equally valid perspectives from which to understand the interactive experience of reading a multiply linked text.” – 104

“Hypertext systems are peculiar in that they work by a kind of oscillation. In creating a hypertext the writer moves back and forth between two different activities: adding topical materials and creating a linked structure of those materials.” – 104

“Authoring a hypertext requires oscillating between two rhetorical worlds, one familiar and one new.” – 104

“In reading a hypertext, however, readers must do more than merely turn pages. At the end of each topic, readers must make a decision to follow a particular link, and at that moment of decision, the text is no longer transparent. Readers become aware that they are seated before a computer and need to act in order to make the text move. In other words, the readers stop reading the words and become conscious again of the hypertext as a structure. They begin to look at the text rather than through it, and this shift in perspective, however brief, interrupts the traditional narrative flow.” – 105
(Note: Obvious connection an reference to Lanham here. It may be worth taking a look at how Brooke, Lanham, and Bolter converse in a future response.)

“Neither in print nor in manuscript did the author have a convenient way to command that the reader’s attention be drawn back to the textual structure itself.” – 105
(Note: Again, I disagree and turn to Danielewski’s House of Leaves and Only Revolutions as contemporary examples of why this is not true.)

“in terms of content rather than technology, the oscillation between looking at and looking through was a familiar technique in ancient rhetoric. Narration was a recognized part of oratory, and in a narrative passage the goal of the orator was to draw the scene as vividly as possible. A good orator could make the audience lose itself in the story. At other times in the speech, the orator’s task would be to keep the audience aware of the circumstances of the speech itself – the trial or assembly, the audience’s responsibility as jurors or participants, the orator’s own position and authority. A good orator would be able to manipulate the audience by taking them back and forth, focusing now on the story behind the speech, now on the speech itself or the legal proceedings. But a good orator would never make the audience aware of the techniques of manipulation, the ways in which the orator brings about the oscillation.” – 105
(Note: There could be something here with texts composed in one mode vs texts that are multimodal. Is it easy to hide the manipulation when only working with one mode? Does this manipulation become harder to hide the more modes that are present? Could be worth further investigation.)

“With hypertext, however, the author must cede some control to the reader, and the ceding of control occurs precisely at the joints int he text, the moments when the reader is invited to choose a link…The reader becomes aware of the text as text and of the author’s attempt to structure the experience of reading. No longer lost in the text, the reader begins to look at the text in a critical way.” – 106

“that is precisely what the hypertextual author must accept: The reader will be repeatedly stepping into the ruptures of the text and examining their structure.” – 106

“For both Cicero and Quintilian, the purpose of delivery was to add emotional color to an argument and so make the argument persuasive…As Quintilian put it, the voice served as an intermediary to transfer the appropriate emotion from the orator to the listener…The goal was a kind of emotional unity between orator and audience.” – 106
(Note: connection to pathos here)

“In hypertext the reader can identify with the author, but this identification happens because the reader begins to take control of the text and therefore to usurp the role of the author. Furthermore, in the ancient conception, delivery comes after the text is formed; it is performance in the sense that an actor performs from the script of a play. As we have seen, in hypertext there is no text prior to delivery; as an individual reading experience, the text comes into existence in the act of delivery.” – 106
(Note: Yes to the second half of the last sentence (as an individual experience), but the text still exists prior to the reader’s intervention. It just exists in a fragmented form.
Also note: Delivery happens when the text is brought to an audience, but considerations for delivery are part of the process from the beginning of the text’s formation.)

“But a hypertext, even by a single author, is always the work of two voices – because, at the points of linking, the (apparent) authorial voice falls silent and readers have at least a limited opportunity to raise their voices.” – 106

“Hypertexts are by nature polyvocal. Contemporary literary critics have argued that all texts are polyvocal, but what might be metaphorically true of printed texts becomes true at an operational level for hypertext.” – 107

“In the figurative sense, what we mean today by the voice of a text was in ancient terms persona or ethos.” – 107

“Memory meant more for Plato than mere repetition; it meant possession, making an idea one’s own, and neither the author nor the reader of a written text could possess that text in the proper, Platonic way.” – 108

“As Plato put it, if reader interrogated the text, they would only receive the same answer again and again. The text could not adjust itself to the needs and limitations of each reader, as of course an author could do when delivering a lecture from ideas held in memory.” – 108
(Note: I disagree. I think a printed text is constantly shifting in its relationship with the reader. As the same reader is different each time he or she approaching a text [because life has happened and changed the reader, even if only in the subtlest of ways], so are the answers communicated by a printed text.)

“The real purpose of a ‘friendly’ interface is to diminish the apparent cognitive distance between memory and the external source of information, to close the gap between the mind and the writing space. The ultimate goal would be to create a seamless connection, in which readers pass without effort from what they remember to what can be found in the writing space. The readers would then be able to ‘remember’ all the information stored in a vast hypertextual database.” – 109

“Like the ancient memory system, the hypertextual network is operative: That is, it is meant to be used to spin out the text. But the text that it spins is not predetermined. A hypertext is a network of possible lines of thought, rather than a fixed representation of a single line.” – 110

“There exists, then, a tension between the visual and verbal rhetorics of hypertext. Two different modes of communication confront each other in the same space and are therefore constantly pulling the author or reader back and forth between the pole of purely alphabetic writing and the pole of the purely pictorial.” – 111
(Note: Why a tension? Or rather, what is the benefit of this tension? Tension allows space for critical understanding. Also, the author and reader are not pulled back and forth between these modes of communication; rather, an individual experiences both simultaneously and ha to navigate the tensions that arise from this.)

” Achieving a new balance between verbal and visual presentation will be a principle task for writing pedagogy and rhetorical theory in the coming decades.” – 111

Though Rude’s framework is focused on reports and public policy, there are aspects of her text that can contribute to my own work. Most importantly, Rude explicitly calls for broadening our understanding of delivery and recognizing how essential it is to the rhetorical process. One important way she calls for this expanded notion of delivery is through temporal concerns. Specifically, Rude points to how any specific rhetorical document continues to be delivered beyond the initial utterance. Considering temporality is one of the major concerns of delivery I am theorizing, her framework here could prove very useful.

Notes:
“Adapting the knowledge developed in corporate and academic settings will require awareness of the long-term nature of social change and the incremental nature of rhetorical acts. The concept of rhetoric itself may expand beyond the usual classroom focus on individual instances (the document, the speech) to accommodate persuasion over time: delivering a message repeatedly and in different media, actively seeking out audiences, and promoting action in response to the message. The publication is not an end in itself but a means to an end of change in policy and behavior.” – 272

“More influential than a single report was the cumulative effect of multiple reports and other initiatives over time.” – 272

“What such an application emphasizes is the rhetorical situation as a relatively short moment in time. What is does not foreground is the situation in which multiple documents and other rhetorical acts may work together to change values and policies. When change is complex, the work of rhetoric – invention, reasoning, presentation, and persuasion in the interest of establishing good public policy – requires vision beyond the single document. Rhetorical theory is robust enough to accommodate a long-term process of change and not just the single instance. But first the rhetorical situation must be understood as long-term, comprehensive, and complex.” – 273
(Note: In response to rhetoric traditionally focusing on “the development of single instances of discourse” – 272)

“[Delivery] illustrates well how the process of rhetoric continues even when a single piece of discourse may seem complete. Delivery understood as taking the document and its argument to the audience may in turn enlighten the earlier stages of development, including invention” – 273

“In suggesting an expanded concept of delivery, I do not wish to abandon the concept of delivery based on publication but rather to stretch this concept to accommodate related rhetorical acts over time.” – 273

“John Frederick Reynolds observes in the preface to his 1993 collection, Rhetorical Memory and Delivery, these ‘problem canons’ of memory and delivery ‘have never received the kind of widespread critical attention they deserve’ in contemporary times (vii). Still, only four of the eleven chapters in his collection focus on delivery” – 274

“Delivery as visual design includes typefaces and paper choices, page layout, and use of visuals. Delivery as medium recognizes options of video, electronic communication, and communication technology as well as print. These analogies to visual design and medium reinforce the important concept that until an idea becomes public (through publication or through delivery of a speech to an audience), it cannot influence an audience to act. The presentation of content influences its availability and reception. Performance has the power to make concepts understandable and to convey urgency. Delivery is essential to persuasion.” – 274

“Publication-based definitions of delivery in written discourse tacitly imply that publication is the goal and end of the writer’s work…What is missing from such definitions in a sense of where these rhetorical acts fit into rhetoric broadly conceived as influencing policy over time.” – 274

“Delivery understood as a finite act, ending with the performance or publication, neglects (or at least does not emphasize) the impact of the publication on the rhetorical situation, the exigence that called the publication into being.” – 274

“[Aristotle’s] use of vulgar, right, justice, and corruption in his description reveals the close relationship between ethics and the concept of delivery.” – 275
(Note: In response to Aristotle’s treatment of delivery in On Rhetoric.)

“The ethos of the message bearer influences the reception of the message. Ethos may derive from standing in the community or from credentials, academic or experiential, but it also requires assurance of the independence of the speaker or writer.” – 275

“The focus on invention, arrangement, and style supports the current-traditional model of writing instruction, with its priorities on the text and correctness. Limiting the realm of rhetoric to the three canons restricts its function and risks making composition an academic exercise rather than an opportunity for civic engagement.” – 276

“The current definitions [of delivery] raise issues of image, access to information, and responsibility for establishing a voice in the public arena as well as to visual design. The need for effective delivery may raise suspicions of corruption of truth, but the alternate perspective is that delivery may be a vehicle of justice. Memory and delivery both represent the connections of the speech or publication to the world beyond the text.” – 276

“The report is a tool of social action as well as a publication, and delivery is strategic action as well as visual design and medium.” – 279

“Getting more people involved in carrying the message to ever wider audiences may be part of what we come to understand as delivery.” – 282

“Change of values and of infrastructure cannot happen until citizens and policy makers decide to make them happen. The message will fail if it is conceived to be contained by the single speech or the single publication. Rather, the message is delivered in multiple media by multiple voices over time. Although visual design and typography may capture the original sense of delivery as a visual act, the activities that distribute the information to various audiences over time may better capture the original sense of delivery as an oral act. The visual and oral components give presence and urgency to the ideas. Seeking out the audience rather than waiting for the audience to read a document dramatically increases the chances that the content will be understood and used. The rhetors are more engaged with the audience than the publication model of delivery presumes.” – 283

“Delivery means accuracy and integrity of the information, representation of information graphically to clarify and not distort information, visual signals to make information accessible and comprehensible and to motivate readers, and the ethos of the author. It also means choice of medium.” – 283

“Examination of practice suggests a complex idea of delivery that includes visual design and medium of the publication but also looks beyond the publication to its uses as a tool of strategic action. Delivery is an active address to a complex audience that does not reside in one place at one time.” – 283
(Note: This statement could be huge in relation to my own work. It deserves some ruminating on to see exactly where it is going to fit, but I think this summarizes Rude’s call for expanding delivery nicely in a universal way.)

“A correct and accurate text is valued, but it is not enough. A user manual must be usable; a proposal must win support; a website must make searching methods transparent and intuitive to people who visit.” – 284

“A concept of delivery that extends beyond publication may help students and professional writers get to this understanding of the relationship of texts to social action. This understanding, in turn, opens possibilities for extended roles for them in civic engagement, not just as editors and grant writers, but also as leaders and strategists who can imagine the information needed to determine a good course of action an envision the strategies necessary to persuade decision makers. In short, it helps to develop our students into rhetoricians, responsible not just for accurate texts but also for promoting good public policy and for good outcomes from their work in publication.” – 284

“The increasing complexity of the rhetorical exigence, the audience, and competing arguments on this worldwide stage all argue for a concept of the canons that can expand beyond the single speech bounded by time and place.” – 285
(Note: Also a crucial statement, particularly for my argument for delivery’s consideration of and interaction with temporality)

“a broad definition [of delivery] invites an increased sense of ethical responsibility for the publication and its uses. Even if the writer is not personally responsible for the outreach and use implied by this broad definition, awareness of the uses of discourse in policy and practice encourages students and writers to look outward beyond the page and to aim for something even more significant than accurate representation and effective typography” – 285

“Delivery can be a vehicle of understanding and justice.” – 285

“Professional writers continue to be responsible for accurate and usable texts, but at the very least they need to understand the consequences of those texts for immediate and extended audiences, for the present and for a possible future, for other related texts, and for the values that constitute a society.” – 285

“Delivery in the sense of information graphics and typography can distort if the writer does not commit to accuracy and integrity or know good principles of representation. Delivery can also be the vehicle by which good ideas reach an audience who can use them for the public good. The writer’s responsibility extends to resolving the exigence that calls the publication into being – to civic engagement.” – 286

“The writer’s responsibility may extend beyond publication. The writer is part of a collaborative team and may not be personally responsible for taking the document into the field, but the writer works with an understanding and vision of a publication within the web of related publications and activities.” – 286

“Instead of erasing delivery from the canons, this perspective puts delivery squarely back into the center of the work of rhetoric, even when the medium is written discourse rather than speech.” – 286

There are two ideas in Hall’s work here that I am particularly interested in. I like that Hall posits that we as human beings tend to render something into narrative form in order to understand its significance; our understandings of the world are coded in story. I personally tend to think this way, that we (humanity) understand ourselves and the world(s) we inhabit through narrative. But this little personal philosophy that is echoed in Hall is secondary. The prime takeaway from this piece in relationship to my thesis is the use of codes. Encoding and decoding could prove useful when considering delivery during the composition process. How am I going to encode my message? How do I anticipate others reading my message? How do I anticipate others using my text? These and other questions emerge when considering encoding/decoding as it relates to delivery.

Notes:
“Traditionally, mass-communications research has conceptualized the process of communication in terms of a circulation circuit or loop. This model has been criticized for its linearity – sender/message/receiver – for its concentration on the level of message exchange and for the absence of a structured conception of the different moments as a complex structure of relations. But it is also possible (and useful) to think of this process in terms of a structure produced and sustained through the articulation of linked but distinctive moments – production, circulation, distribution/consumption, reproduction.” – 51

“a continuous circuit – production-distribution-production – can be sustained through a ‘passage of forms.'” – 51

“The ‘object’ of these practices is meanings and messages in the form of sign-vehicles of a specific kind organized, like any form of communication or language, through the operation of codes within the syntagmatic chain of a discourse” – 52

“The process thus requires, at the production end, its material instruments – its ‘means’ – as well
as its own sets of social (production) relations – the organization and combination of practices within media apparatuses. But it is in the discursive form that the circulation of the product takes place, as well as its distribution to different audiences. Once accomplished, the discourse must then be translated – transformed, again – into social practices if the circuit is to be both completed and effective. If no ‘meaning is taken, there can be no ‘consumption.’ If the meaning is not articulated in practice, it has no effect. The value of this approach is that while each of the moments, in articulation, is necessary to the circuit as a whole, no one moment can fully guarantee the next moment with which it is articulated. Since each has its specific modality and conditions of existence, each can constitute its own break or interruption of the ‘passage of forms’ on whose continuity the flow of effective production (that is, ‘reproduction’) depends.” – 52

“the discursive form of the message has a privileged position in the communicative exchange (from the viewpoint of circulation), and that the moments of ‘encoding’ and ‘decoding,’ though only ‘relatively autonomous’ in relation to the communicative process as a whole, are determinate moments” – 52

“In the moment when a historical event passes under the sign of discourse, it is subject to all the complex formal ‘rules’ by which language signifies. To put it paradoxically, the event must become a ‘story’ before it can become a communicative event.” – 52

“Thus the transposition into and out of the ‘message form’ (or the mode of symbolic exchange) is not a random ‘moment,’ which we can take up or ignore at our convenience. The ‘message form’ is a determinate moment; though, at another level, it comprises the surface movements of the communications system only and requires, at another stage, to be integrated into the social relations of the communication process as a whole, of which it forms only a part.” – 52

“Further, though the production structures of television originate the television discourse, they do not constitute a closed system. They draw topics, treatments, agendas, events, personnel, images of the audience, ‘definitions of the situation’ from other sources and other discursive formations within the wider socio-cultural and political structure of which they are a differentiated part. Philip Elliott has expressed this point succinctly, within a more traditional framework, in his discussion of the way in which the audience is both the ‘source’ and the ‘receiver’ of the television message. Thus – to borrow Marx’s terms – circulation and reception are, indeed, ‘moments’ of the production process in television and are reincorporated, via a number of skewed and structured ‘feedbacks,’ into the production process itself. The consumption or reception of the television message is thus also itself a ‘moment’ of the production process in its larger sense, though the latter is ‘predominant’ because it is the ‘point of departure for the realization’ of the
message.” – 53

“It is this set of decoded meanings which ‘have an effect,’ influence, entertain, instruct or persuade, with very complex perceptual, cognitive, emotional, ideological or behavioural consequences. In a ‘determinate’ moment the structure employs a code and yields a ‘message’: at another determinate moment the ‘message,’ via its decodings, issues into the structure of social practices.” – 53

“The degrees of symmetry – that is the degrees of ‘understanding’ and ‘misunderstanding’ in the communicative exchange – depend on the degrees of symmetry/asymmetry (relations of equivalence) established between the positions of the ‘personifications,’ encoder-producer and decoder-receiver. But this in turn depends on the degrees of identity/non-identity between the codes which perfectly or imperfectly transmit, interrupt or systematically distort what has been transmitted.” – 54

“What are called ‘distortions’ or ‘misunderstandings’ arise precisely from the lack of equivalence between the two sides in the communicative exchange” – 54

“At either end of the communicative chain the use of the semiotic paradigm promises to dispel the lingering behaviourism which has dogged mass-media research for so long, especially in its approach to content.” – 55

“The television sign is a complex one. It is itself constituted by the combination of two types of discourse, visual and aural. Moreover, it is an iconic sign, in Peirce’s terminology, because ‘it posseses some of the properties of the thing represented.’…Since the visual discourse translates a three-dimensional world into two-dimensional knowledge planes, it cannot, of course, be the referent or concept it signifies…Reality exists outside language, but it is constantly mediated by and through language: and what we can know and say has to be produced in and through discourse. Discursive ‘knowledge’ is the product not of the transparent representation of of the ‘real’ in language but of the articulation of language on real relations and conditions.” – 55 [sic]

“Naturalism and ‘realism’ – the apparent fidelity of the representation to the thing or concept represented – is the result, the effect, of a certain specific articulation of language on the ‘real.'” – 55

“The operation of naturalized codes reveals not the transparency and ‘naturalness’ of language but the depth, the habituation and the near-universality of the codes in use.” – 55

“what naturalized codes demonstrate is the degree of habituation produced when there is a fundamental alignment and reciprocity – an achieved equivalence – between the encoding and decoding sides of an exchange of meanings.” – 55

“The articulation of an arbitrary sign – whether visual or verbal – with the concept of a referent is the product not of nature but of convention, and the conventionalism of discourses requires the intervention, the support, of codes.” – 56

“Every visual sign in advertising connotes a quality, situation, value, or inference, which is present as an implication or implied meaning, depending on the connotational positioning.” – 56

“Codes of this order clearly contract relations for the sign with the wider universe of ideologies in a society. These codes are the means by which power and ideology are made to signify in particular discourses.” – 56

“The so-called denotative level of the televisual sign is fixed by certain, very complex (but limited or ‘closed’) codes. But its connotative level, though also bounded, is more open, subject to more active transformations, which exploit its polysemic values. Any such already constituted sign is potentially transformable into more than one connotative configuration. Polysemy must not, however, be confused with pluralism. Connotative codes are not equal among themselves” – 57

“The different areas of social life appear to be mapped out into discursive domains, hierarchically organized into dominant or preferred meanings.” – 57

“We say dominant, not ‘determined,’ because it is always possible to order, classify, assign and decode an event within more than one ‘mapping.’ But we say ‘dominant’ because there exists a pattern of ‘preferred readings’; and these both have the institutional/political/ideological
order imprinted in them and have themselves become institutionalized.” – 57

“Thus to clarity a ‘misunderstanding’ at the connotative level, we must refer, through the codes, to the orders of social life, of economic and political power, and of ideology. Further, since these mappings are ‘structured in dominance’ but not closed, the communicative process consists not in the unproblematic assignment of every visual item to its given position within a set of prearranged codes, but of performative rules – rules of competence and use, of logics-in-use – which seek actively to enforce or pre-fer one semantic domain over another and rule items into and out of their appropriate meaning-sets.” – 57

“No doubt misunderstandings of a literal kind do exist. The viewer does not know the terms employed, cannot follow the complex logic of argument or exposition, is unfamiliar with the language, finds the concepts too alien or difficult or is foxed by the expository narrative. But more often broadcasters are concerned that the audience has failed to take the meaning as they – the broadcasters – intended. What they really mean to say is that viewers are not operating within the ‘dominant’ or ‘preferred’ code.” – 58

“In recent years discrepancies of this kind have usually been explained by reference to ‘selective perception.’ This is the door via which a residual pluralism evades the compulsions of a highly structured, asymmetrical and non-equivalent process. Of course, there will always be private, individual, variant readings. But ‘selective perception’ is almost never as selective, random or privatized as the concept suggests.” – 58

“since there is no necessary correspondence between encoding and decoding, the former can attempt to ‘pre-fer’ but cannot prescribe or guarantee the latter, which has its own conditions of existence. Unless they are wildly aberrant, encoding will have the effect of constructing some of
the limits and parameters within which decodings will operate.” – 58

“But the vast range [of messages] must contain some degree of reciprocity between encoding and decoding moments, otherwise we could not speak of an effective communicative exchange at all.” – 59

“We identify three hypothetical positions from which decodings of a tele-visual discourse may be constructed.” – 59

“The first hypothetical position is that of the dominant-hegemonic position. When the viewer takes the connoted meaning from, say, a television newscast or curet affairs programme full and straight, and decodes the message in terms of the reference code in which it has been encoded, we might say that the view is operating inside the dominant code.” – 59

“The second position we would identify is that of the negotiated code or position. Majority audiences probably understand quite adequately what has been dominantly defined and professionally signified. The dominant definitions, however, are hegemonic precisely because they represent definition of situations and events which are ‘in dominance,’ (global). Dominant definitions connect events, implicitly or explicitly, to grand totalizations, to the great syntagmatic views-of-the-world: they take ‘large views’ of issues: they relate events to the ‘national interest’ or to the level of geo-politics, even if they make these connections in truncated, inverted or mystified ways. The definition of a hegemonic viewpoint is (a) that it defines within its terms the mental horizon, the universe, of possible meanings, of a whole sector of relations in a society or culture; and (b) that it carries with it the stamp of legitimacy – it appears coterminous with what is ‘natural,’ ‘inevitable,’ ‘taken for granted’ about the social order. Decoding within the negotiated version contains a mixture of adaptive and oppositional elements: it acknowledges the legitimacy of the hegemonic definitions to make the grand significations (abstract), while, at a more restricted, situational (situated) level, it makes its own ground rules – it operates with exceptions to the rule.” – 60

“Negotiated codes operate through what we might call particular or situated logics: and these logics are sustained by their differential and unequal relation to the discourses and logics of power.” – 60

“We suspect that the great majority of so-called ‘misunderstandings’ arise from the contradictions and disjunctures between hegemonic-dominant encodings and negotiated-corporate decodings.” – 61

“Finally, it is possible for a viewer perfectly to understand both the literal and the connotative inflection given by a discourse but to decode the message in a globally contrary way. He/she detotalizes the message in the preferred code in order to retotalize the message within some alternative framework of reference…He/she is operating with what we must call an oppositional code.”

Quotes taken from: Hall, Stuart. “Encoding/Decoding.” Google Scholar. PDF
(Note: I cannot find where this particular except was exactly published. May have to find another copy of this to work from if I use this for thesis.)

Boym’s discussion of restorative and reflective nostalgia could prove useful in connecting memory into my own work with delivery. Nostalgia could possibly be a tool used by rhetors to deliver information in a particular way. I think Boym’s work might have a place in the ethos of delivery; quite possibly restorative nostalgia could reflect upon a negative ethos, while reflective nostalgia is a positive ethos? There is work to be done here; I’d like to follow up on this when the time is appropriate.

Notes:
“The word ‘nostalgia’ comes from two Greek roots, nostos meaning ‘return home’ and algia ‘longing.’ I would define it as a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy. Nostalgic love can only survive in a long-distance relationship. A cinematic image of nostalgia is a double exposure, or a superimposition of two images—of home and abroad, of past and present, of dream and everyday life. The moment we try to force it into a single image, it breaks the frame or burns the surface.” – 7

“Contrary to our intuition, ‘nostalgia’ came from medicine, not from poetry or politics.” – 7

“First, nostalgia is not ‘antimodern’; it is not necessarily opposed to modernity but coeval with it. Nostalgia and progress are like Jekyll and Hyde: doubles and mirror images of one another. Nostalgia is not merely an expression of local longing, but a result of a new understanding of time and space that makes the division into ‘local’ and ‘universal’ possible.
Second, nostalgia appears to be a longing for a place, but it is actually a yearning for a different time—the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams. In a broader sense, nostalgia is a rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress…
Third, nostalgia, in my view, is not always retrospective; it can be prospective as well. The fantasies of the past, determined by the needs of the present, have a direct impact on the realities of the future. The consideration of the future makes us take responsibility for our nostalgic tales.” – 8

“nostalgia is about the relationship between individual biography and the biography of groups or nations, between personal and collective memory.” – 9

“In this understanding, nostalgia is seen as an abdication of personal responsibility, a guilt-free homecoming, an ethical and aesthetic failure. Nostalgia produces subjective visions of afflicted imagination that tend to colonize the realm of politics, history, and everyday perception.” – 9
(Note: In response to the traditional Historian view on nostalgia)

“Modern nostalgia is paradoxical in the sense that the universality of its longing can make us more empathetic towards fellow humans, and yet the moment we try to repair that longing with a particular belonging—or the apprehension of loss with a rediscovery of identity and especially of a national community and unique and pure homeland—we often part ways with others and put an end to mutual understanding.” – 9

“The danger of nostalgia is that it tends to confuse the actual home and the imaginary one. In extreme cases it can create a phantom homeland, for the sake of which one is ready to die or kill. Unreflective nostalgia can breed monsters.” – 9

“technology and nostalgia have become co-dependent: new technology and advanced marketing stimulate ersatz nostalgia—for the things you never thought you had lost—and anticipatory nostalgia—for the present that flees with the speed of a click.” – 10

“Nostalgia inevitably reappears as a defense mechanism in a time of accelerated rhythms of life and historical upheavals.” – 10

“My hypothesis is that the spread of nostalgia had to do not only with dislocation in space but also with the changing conception of time.” – 12

“I distinguish between two main types of nostalgia: the restorative and the reflective. Restorative nostalgia stresses nostos (home) and attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home. Reflective nostalgia thrives on algia (the longing itself) and delays the homecoming—wistfully, ironically, desperately. These distinctions are not absolute binaries, and one can surely make a more refined mapping of the grey areas on the outskirts of imaginary homelands. I want to identify the main tendencies and narrative structures in ‘plotting’ nostalgia, in making sense of one’s longing and loss. Restorative nostalgia does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition. Reflective nostalgia dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity. Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt.” – 13

“Restorative nostalgia is at the core of recent national and religious revivals. It knows two main plots—the return to origins and the conspiracy. Reflective nostalgia does not follow a single plot but explores ways of inhabiting many places at once and imagining different time zones. It loves details, not symbols. At best, it can present an ethical and creative challenge, not merely a pretext for midnight melancholias. This typology of nostalgia allows me to distinguish between national memory that is based on a single version of national identity, on the one hand, and social memory, which consists of collective frameworks that mark but do not define individual memory, on the other hand. The rhetoric of restorative nostalgia is not about “the past,” but rather about universal values, family, nature, homeland, truth. The rhetoric of reflective nostalgia is about taking time out of time and about grasping the fleeing present.” – 13

“To understand restorative nostalgia, it is important to distinguish between the habits of the past and the habits of the restoration of the past. Eric Hobsbawm differentiates between age-old ‘custom’ and nineteenth-century ‘invented’ traditions. New traditions are characterized by a higher degree of symbolic formalization and ritualization than were the actual peasant customs and conventions after which they are patterned. There are two paradoxes here. First, the more rapid and sweeping the pace and scale of modernization, the more conservative and unchangeable the new traditions tend to be. Second, the stronger the rhetoric of continuity with the historical past and emphasis on traditional values, the more selectively the past is usually presented.” – 14

“Restorative nostalgia knows two main plots: the restoration of origins and the conspiracy theory. The conspiratorial worldview reflects a nostalgia for a transcendental cosmology and a simple premodern conception of good and evil.” – 14

“Restoration (from re-staure—re-establish) signifies a return to the original stasis, to the prelapsarian moment. While restorative nostalgia returns and rebuilds one homeland with paranoic determination, reflective nostalgia fears return with the same passion. Instead of recreation of the lost home, reflective nostalgia can foster the creation of aesthetic individuality.
Reflective nostalgia is concerned with historical and individual time, with the irrevocability of the past and human finitude. Re-flection means new flexibility, not the reestablishment of stasis. The focus here is not on the recovery of what is perceived to be an absolute truth, but on the meditation on history and the passage of time.” – 15

“Restorative and reflective nostalgia might overlap in their frames of reference but do not coincide in their narratives and plots of identity. In other words, they can use the same triggers of memory and symbols, the same Proustian madeleine cookie, but tell different stories about it…restorative nostalgia ends up reconstructing emblems and rituals of home and homeland in an attempt to conquer and spatialize time, reflective nostalgia cherishes shattered fragments of memory and temporalizes space. Restorative nostalgia takes itself dead seriously. Reflective nostalgia, on the other hand, can be ironic and humorous. It reveals that longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another, as affective memories do not absolve one from compassion, judgment, or critical reflection. ” – 15

“Reflective nostalgia does not pretend to rebuild the mythical place called home; it is ‘enamored of distance, not of the referent itself.’ This type of nostalgic narrative is ironic, inconclusive, and fragmentary. Nostalgics of the second type are aware of the gap between identity and resemblance; the home is in ruins or, on the contrary, has just been renovated and gentrified beyond recognition. It is precisely this defamiliarization and sense of distance that drives them to tell their story, to narrate the relationship between past, present, and future. Through that longing, they discover that the past is not that which no longer exists, but, to quote Bergson, the past is something that ‘might act, and will act by inserting itself into a present sensation from which
it borrows the vitality.'” – 15
(Note: see footnotes 12 and 13 for citation info for quoted material)

“Immigrants understand the limitations of nostalgia and the tenderness of what I call ‘diasporic intimacy,’ which cherishes non-native, elective affinities.” – 16

“Inability to return home is both a personal tragedy and an enabling force.” – 16

“While restorative nostalgia returns and rebuilds one’s homeland with paranoic determination, reflective nostalgia fears return with the same passion. Home, after all, is not a gated community. Paradise on earth might turn out to be another Potemkin village with no exit. The imperative of a contemporary nostalgic is to be homesick and sick of home—occasionally at the same time.” – 18

I wanted to make sure I collected my quotes from this text close to the Lanham text as well. While DeVoss and Porter don’t directly engage in Lanham the way Brooke does, there is still a relationship here that needs to be traced. Many of the copyright and intellectual property issues DeVoss and Porter navigate here speak directly to the predictions made by Lanham. Lanham saw that a print-based model for copyright would prove insufficient and problematic for digital texts and called for reconceiving our systems to account for this; DeVoss and Porter echo this call and offer a model for understanding the ethics of distribution based on networking, particularly P2P networks.

Also, this echoes Trimbur and his work on the circulation of writing based on a Marxist model of circulation.

Notes:
“Rather, the Napster crisis represents a profound cultural shift. Napster matters because it signals a new ‘digital ethic’ of text use and file distribution that runs counter to the usual expectations that have governed the sharing and use of print texts (Jesiek, 2003). Composition teachers need to understand that ethic, which is not just confined to music and movie files shared across peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. The attitudes and expectations students have learned in digital filesharing environments enter our classrooms, influence students’ production and understanding of print texts (not to mention electronic texts), and affect their conception of the rhetorical situation.
From a rhetorical perspective, Napster represents a crisis in delivery, the often-neglected rhetorical canon. Napster has fundamentally changed the national landscape regarding the digital distribution—and thus the delivery—of documents. Napster should matter to writing teachers because it represents a paradigm shift: from an older view of writing as alphabetic text on paper, intended for print distribution, to an emergent and ill-understood view of writing as weaving digital media for distribution across networked spaces for various audiences engaged in different types of reading. Writing is no longer just alphabetic text—writing is also audio and video. And writing is also hypertext and the delivery of multimedia content via the Internet and the Web. And writing is chunks of tagged text and data floating within databases and underneath the Internet in P2P spaces.” – 179

“There is also an economic shift, a shift in terms of the rules and ethics governing the sharing and distribution of writing, what rhetoric has traditionally called delivery. And so delivery is critical to our focus because the revolution is not just hypertext and it’s not just the Internet and it’s not just new media. There is a consequent revolution that has to do with the fundamental rhetoric and ethics of delivery and distribution the very reasons why people write and share their writing in the first place.” – 180

“digital filesharing forms the basis for a new ethic of digital delivery, an ethic that should lead us to reconsider our policies regarding plagiarism and that, in general, we should consider when developing digital composition pedagogies.” – 180

“We thus use the term ‘post-Napster’ to symbolize the death of Napster as it was originally conceived: a space for free filesharing and for consumption not framed by costs and fees but by an ethic of open distribution and collaboration.” – 182

“First, there is widespread confusion as to what constitutes appropriate use of copyright-protected materials—what is owned in spaces where information is freely and openly shared, what is allowable within and across networks that allow entire movies (including those not yet released to theaters) to be downloaded in a matter of hours. Not surprisingly, there is also deep confusion as to what is ‘right’ when using the words and works of another, what ‘counts’ as writing when chunks of text—both text-as-code and text-as-content, not to mention myriad other creations, such as audio and video files—can be copied and digitally moved into a different context and a new document, and where the lines between one person’s work and another’s become electronically blurred through linking practices and by scripting and coding approaches. What is allowable ‘remixing?’ What is Fair Use of digital audio and video? What is a copyright infringement? What is piracy?” – 182

“the cultural and ethical battles lines have been clearly drawn. On the one side we have the fierce protectors of long and strong copyright control of digital material (like the RIAA), arguing that copyright is a necessary mechanism for protecting vested economic interests. On the other side we have an emergent culture of young people (mostly) who live in (and, at times, create) networks encouraging widespread sharing and distribution of digital material. The clash is between a view of the Internet as a mechanism for delivery of goods to market versus a view of the Internet as a public living space.” – 185

“When rhetoric asks questions about audience and purpose—’What is my purpose for writing?’, and ‘who is my audience?’—it is also implicitly asking questions about delivery, economics, copyright, and credit.” – 185

“Think of copyright not as merely an abstruse legal matter. Think of it as a set of guidelines governing the relationship between writers, readers, and publishers. From that standpoint, copyright is—or should be—an essential question of delivery and a key topic of rhetoric.” – 185

“What is important to recognize is that copyright law ‘was created as a policy that balanced the interests of authors, publishers, and readers. It was not intended to be a restrictive property right’ (Vaidhyanathan, 2002). Authors and inventors would enjoy the fruits of their labors ‘for limited times’—and then the writing and discoveries would be freely available for use by society ‘to promote the progress of science and useful arts.’ Copyright law, then, is essentially characterized by a balance: between (a) creating a system of incentive by rewarding the author’s labor and (b) encouraging benefits to society from the flow of information that can stimulate new ideas, inventions, and creations.” – 185

“Copyright law was not framed as an absolute, God-given property right of the individual creator, but as a temporary right.” – 186

“Here [Sandra Day] O’Connor makes very clear that the purpose of copyright is not to reward authors. Rather, rewarding authors is a means toward an end, and that end (‘the primary objective’) is ‘the progress of science and useful arts.’ In short, copyright serves society. What is significant in O’Connor’s statement is that it presumes that copyright and Fair Use favor progress—what is good for society trumps the rewards to a select and small group of creators. Yet, O’Connor’s statement also recognizes a balance: It is important to credit the work of creators in order to motivate creations that benefit society.” – 186

“Copyleftists may favor the broad public use of information, but recognition of the source of creation is core to filesharing; P2P users hardly ever violate this ethic.” – 186

“Authorship and origin, perhaps murky (as the examples above illustrate), are still core to this emergent digital ethic.” – 187

“More importantly, however—and most importantly for this article—Napster has birthed a new digital ethic, a new understanding of intellectual property and ownership for millions of people around the world.” – 187

“Music aficionados value the work of the artists but resent the price-gouging practices of the producers/distributors.” – 187

“Enter the Internet, and suddenly there is a mechanism in place for broad, immediate, and flawless reproduction of sound. And now the recording industry is in trouble—because the value they add to the product is no longer necessary.” – 188

“The industry is not in trouble. The music and recording industry in the United States is actually thriving in spite of this new technology that would seem to render it obsolete.” – 188

“However, Sony Corporation v. Universal City Studios, Inc. was a core case in determining the Fair Use of technologically captured information. The Supreme Court, ruling in favor of Sony, explained that any individual may reproduce a copyrighted work for a Fair Use” – 188

“Even under their worst-case example, ‘it would take 5,000 downloads to reduce the sales of an album by one copy. After annualizing, this would imply a yearly sales loss of two million albums, which is virtually rounding error, given that 803 million records were sold in 2002.’ (Schwartz, 2004)” – 188, footnotes

“Even before Napster, since the embrace of the World Wide Web by commercial interests in the late-1990s, we have been in the midst of a copyright war—an intellectual property and Fair Use war over digital information. This war puts in opposition two different views of copyright and Fair Use of information, two different economic models of development, and, ultimately, two different rhetorical ideologies” – 189

“The proponents of strict copyright controls favor a view of information as a tangible product; they recognize (rightly) that the technological capability of the individual networked computer is an immense threat to their proprietary control of audio, video, and other forms of digital information.” – 190

“But the copyright changes they are advocating will affect print distribution as well as audio and video filesharing; these changes will limit educational use of electronic material; they will limit the ability of students and teachers to access information for research; and they will stifle criticism, especially criticism of corporate behavior, consumer culture, and economic policy (Benkler, 1999; “Copyright, Plagiarism,” 1998; Gurak & Johnson-Eilola, 1998; Heins, 2002; Kranich, 2004; Mann, Barlow, Stefik, & Lessig, 1998; Schiller, 1989).” – 190

“Given their view of the Internet, these content controllers need to constrain digital producers (e.g., writers) and push them into a passive consumer role, which they do through two means: (1) through the design of passive point-and-click websites and other ‘interactive’ media, which are an attempt to condition user response toward consumerism and (2) through lobbying, legislation, and threats of litigation, which are attempts to control the renegade audience, the illegal hyperlinker, and the rampant music downloader.” – 190

“They portray the individual participant as a ‘hacker’ or ‘pirate’—the insurgent whose acts of production are really acts of theft. ‘Good users’ are those who passively consume, respect intellectual property, and pay per use. ‘Bad users’ are those who produce parody websites, or who hyperlink without permission, or who distribute and download content without paying for it.” – 190

“As they see it, the Internet is occupied by a wild race of inhabitants—hackers, pirates, and cyberpunks who embrace anti-American slogans such as ‘information wants to be free’ and ‘let the music play’—dangerous electronic vandals with no respect for intellectual property, corporate security, or economic growth. They show no respect for property lines; they ‘steal’ audio, video, and texts and redistribute them wantonly, thus showing disdain for an economic model that insists on measuring the value of information by its cost. They co-opt images for their own political and satirical purposes. They disrespect MickeyMouse. These cyber radicals—we might call them ‘digital content producers,’ perhaps even ‘writers’—see the Internet as a free space to be ‘surfed’ by all for purposes of enjoyment, recreation, political discussion, and education. They have a primitive notion of space and property, a naive conception of economics, and an outmoded sense of what will motivate content production.” – 191

“On the other side of the political spectrum we have small business, small Web publishers, librarians, and public interest groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, which hold to a very different view of the Internet, seeing it as a public commons, as a freely accessible space for citizens to share information and exercise their right to participate in the shaping of public policy. They are working actively to protect the potential of the Internet as a democratizing space…Theirs is a pro-active and policy-driven approach to technology that aims to change the terms in which technology development is typically couched.” 192

“These others (we might call them the ‘cyberlibertarians’) want networks—especially the Internet, which is the network—preserved for the public welfare; they want a ‘free net.’ The Internet of course is not free: It was originally created and has been paid for by U.S. citizens’ tax dollars and is thus, in some senses, a publicly owned, shared space. This public advocacy approach represents an attempt to create a certain kind of public space. That is, these advocates are attempting to influence technology design, not via technical approaches to system design, but via law and technology policy—to create the kind of Internet that would promote the emergence of a critical, involved, participatory audience” – 192

“Lessig argued that a robust public reserve is vital to innovation, creativity, and originality. New work grows out of old work” – 192

“This cyberlibertarian notion of the cultural commons has much in common with the rhetorical principles that we know as collaboration and intertextuality. People do not make new works out of nothing. They borrow and intertextually stitch and massage fragments into new works. Writing is not an isolated act of individual genius, as the romantic view of authorship would have us believe (Porter, 1986). The act of writing is fundamentally collaborative, fundamentally social, and fundamentally reliant on an existing repertoire of ‘texts’ (broadly defined) existing in a community or culture.” – 193

“But piracy does have its own limits, rules, ethics and those are the conventions that we need to understand within the realm of digital writing.” – 193

“We are also arguing for an expanded notion of delivery, one that embraces the politics and economics of publishing: the politics of technology development as they impact production and distribution, and the politics of information” – 194

“A renewal of interest in delivery requires that we take up the question of ‘economies of
writing.’ Economics has to do with money, but not only money. It has to do more broadly with value, exchange, and capital; with production and consumption of goods; with giving, receiving, and sharing; with purpose, desire, and motivation; with the distribution of resources, products, and services; and with the systems of understanding that people rely on when they engage in such activities. Writing—all writing, we would say—resides in economic systems of value, exchange, and capital, and we want to recommend that rhetorical theory take up questions regarding ‘economies of writing.'” – 194

“The development of Internet writing in its various manifestations (Web sites, email, multimedia, instant messaging) is dissolving the traditional gap between writing and publishing.” – 195

“You have on your desk, sitting in front of you, the capacity to compete with the publishing regime, even to overthrow it. You have a networked computer with a copy–paste function, with the capacity to download and upload files, and, if you have broadband Internet access, with the means to distribute and access a wide variety of information (text, graphics, audio, video) globally, quickly, and relatively easily.” – 195

“Delivery is the canon that could allow us to connect concerns about, say, audience and Web design with questions about the economics of publishing and the politics of information—and it provides a space for teachers and scholars of Rhetoric/Composition to contribute to the debate about information law and policy, including the intellectual property debates.” – 196

“In the digital, copy-and-paste, information-rich, post-Napster age, we must renegotiate our personal and institutional approaches to plagiarism. If we don’t do so, we will flounder in the face of digital possibilities rather than take advantage of them, and we will miss the moments in which we can best cultivate critical, appropriate understandings of delivery and digital ethics among ourselves and the students in our classrooms.” – 197

“The plagiarism policies and detect-and-punish approaches of many writing teachers and almost all academic honesty policies align well with approaches to information as owned, controlled, and carefully distributed.” – 198

“Clearly, even in the face of postmodern approaches to authorship and changing dynamics of collaboration and text production, removing another author’s name and replacing it with your own is wrong. But there’s also nothing in the ‘Protection of Scholarship and Grades’ document that suggests that teachers very narrowly define collaboration, prohibit the appropriate use of sources, or consider it part of their academic work to ferret out possible plagiarists.” – 198

“In fact, Rhetoric/Composition has a long legacy of discussions and tools available to us so that we can better understand issues of intellectual property as they affect our worklives and our teaching.” – 199

“Lunsford(1999) suggested that we tackle the difficult work of creating, enacting, and promoting ‘alternative forms of agency and ways of owning that would shift the focus from owning to owning up; from rights and entitlements to responsibilities […] and answerability; from a sense of the self as radically individual to the self as always in relation’ (p.535). Lunsford’s claim provides an initial framework for creating space in today’s digital, corporate, globalized world for the subjectivity of writers, writers who own up, who attend to the responsibilities they face as writers, and who answer and are answerable to the texts that they produce” – 199

“The Fair Use doctrine limits the exclusive rights of copyright holders, allowing certain individuals to fairly use copyright protected work. Fair Use fits well as a framework from which we can encourage students, as Lunsford suggested, to focus on owning up and to approach writing tasks with an understanding of the responsibilities of being answerable for one’s choices, uses, and citations.” – 199
(Note: See footnotes on this page for further discussion of Fair Use)

“Plagiarism is, we argue, beside the point; the key issue of digital ethics in a post-Napster world is sharing and Fair Use. As we see it, the purpose of writing is not to reward the author, or for the author to gain prestige, credit, wealth, and fame. Author reward is a means and not an end. To borrow some language from the U.S. Constitution, the purpose of writing is to promote, for the common good, the progress of the sciences and useful arts; to improve society; to help people live their lives; to expand their knowledge, to excite their imagination, to ease their anxieties; to help them live, grow, survive, and thrive. In other words, the ultimate aim of writing lies in its ethical effects: to improve society, inform individuals, expand knowledge, assist communities, and so on.
Given this sense of aim, an ethic of Fair Use based on reciprocal filesharing promotes these broad goals, not a negative ethic of plagiarism and punishment, but a positive ethic that promotes collaboration, sharing, and Fair Use. Writing is an act of sharing and borrowing as well as of creating. When ever you write, you borrow ideas, phrases, images, sounds, details from others—and then you weave those pieces into a new cloth and onto new fabric and with new threads and that becomes ‘your’ writing.” – 200

“The ethic we describe here requires an acknowledgment of collaboration—and in that respect the new digital ethic is not so very different from the old print ethic, or at least it doesn’t seem to be different. However, the difference lies in the purpose for acknowledgment.” – 200

“The new digital ethic has a different orbit of delivery, ethic of use, of territory, and of ownership.” – 200

“we believe it is a positive ethic of filesharing and not how it is usually described as a criminal act of piracy.” – 201

“The ethic we are describing here corresponds to Pekka Himanen’s (2001) and others’ positive notion of ‘hackers’ as programmers and other information developers who believe that ‘information sharing is a positive good, and that it is an ethical duty of hackers to share their expertise by writing free software and facilitating access to information and to computing resources wherever possible” (Himanen, vii).” – 201

“Teaching a positive ethics of sharing is important to teach a balanced approach to and understanding of copyright, not just to teach respect for others’ work (granted, this is important) but also to teach respect for access, for Fair Use, and for the public domain—in other words, the flip side of copyright, the side that we don’t hear about from the recording industry or the MPAA. Yes,we need to teach students to ‘avoid plagiarism’ and to respect the labor of others, but we also just as vigorously need to teach students to defend and contribute to the public domain, to encourage Fair Use of others’ material, and to share their work as widely as possible.” – 202

“Teach not just a rhetoric of audience and purpose, but an “economics of rhetoric” in
conjunction with a theory of digital delivery.” – 202, emphasis in original

“Our composition pedagogies need to emphasize the question of value—of why it is people write, produce, interact, and disseminate ideas in writing on the Internet. Perhaps this is one of our most important next steps and future directions as a field. We need to continue to delve into the various digital spaces in which people shape their identities, exert subjectivities, and write themselves into the world. And we also need to dig deeper into the structures and laws at play in these digital spaces to better understand how it is ownership can be rewritten and Fair Use can be protected.” – 203